Story Number Ten
by MidnightCereal
Summary: A Halloween story that takes place after the Twelfth Angel incident. It gets a little nasty in places: End Disclosure.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Story Number Ten: Chapter 1

By MidnightCereal

Shinji awoke to talk radio trickling through the orange hospital walls. Dusk, then.

Thin linen sheets pooled around his waist as he sat up in bed and contemplated rolling off the mattress to pee; fatigue and routine overwhelmed him. He collected his shoulders and showed his back to the door, folding himself just enough so he could see the inverted Tokyo-3 sprawl punching downward outside his window – and frown at it.

As far as Shinji concerned himself, the day had begun with his chest puffed out and an airy cadence he had made up on the spot. It had been harder to breathe like that at the end of the day, with Misato's weight shuddering against his sternum and Asuka's voice drawn out into that thin, smug film.

_Weren't you going to punish him?_

Let's catalyze the anxiety, hmm? Why should he lie in bed and wait for it?

So here we go: Sitting naked in metal tubes and pushing synch rates while women logged alpha waves and the temperature of your junk; psychosomatic compound fractures; then Asuka's breast huddled against her tank top like a plump white cub in a shallow cave; and then sinking into a localized night, realizing oblivion wasn't only black but had a diameter and the consistency of quicksand and was filled with reflections that didn't need your permission to speak to you.

Shinji stopped there. He didn't _feel_ anxious. Did having to pee more count? Might as well be waiting for a flu shot. And Ritsuko or Misato, whoever owned him at the moment, seemed content in facilitating the downtime. Fair enough.

He had placed the muffled broadcast - a national syndication Misato listened to whenever she felt opinionated, so always - before he heard his door slide open and sterile sounds tumble in from the hallway. It couldn't have been the short medical supply robot, the MedMECH he'd seen trolling Nerv Medical, because he'd noticed it squatting in the corner of his room, snoozing.

The nurse, then. By now, Shinji had reduced the woman to a tight, full-figured grin crowned with a bun of brunette hair, someone who bumped into his bed and assured him hourly that Doctor Akagi would soon be there to stick things in him. Shinji hadn't seen the nurse since he'd been admitted for the latest incident, which worked great. He was sick of fishing out that pocket lint smile for her and insisting he felt fine, just fine.

He considered feigning sleep, but his hospital pajamas were, impossibly, a size too small. Also, the nurse hit him in the back of the head with an orange.

"Feeding time for all little piglets..."

Shinji rubbed the back of his head and rolled over. Squinted across the tray of rehydrated poultry Asuka had carted in to meet the indignity in her blue eyes.

"Don't ask," she said.

"I wasn't going to," he said.

"You were thinking it." Well, yeah. He shrugged and started to remove the orange from beneath him so he could lay his head back down on the only soft thing in the room. "Hey, get up! You think I rolled this cafeteria crap in here for my health?"

"I'm just tired. I really appreciate it." Shinji locked his elbows, back stiffening as he tried to sound grateful that she had brought him crap to eat. "Really."

"Better," said Asuka. She made a face at the nutritional label on the milk carton before setting it back down and wiping her hands on her pleated hips. "You're starving anyway, unless you're one of those sleep-eating freaks."

"How do you know?" asked Shinji.

"Hm? Oh, I don't." She started skinning an apple with a stubby paring knife, watching as the red peel coiled down to his food cart like a broken spring. "I just assumed, you know? Normal people usually solve the no food thing after a day or so without eating."

"It's Monday?"

"Misato called you in sick tomorrow, too." Asuka stopped peeling long enough to pitch her fist into her hip, making a chicken wing with her arm before sighing down at him. The sound drew bubbles up in him like the bends. "Why bother going to school at all? That place is one big proxy box, if you know what I mean. I could tell you things, Shinji."

"Like?"

"It's just a theory I have," she said. "We'll talk when you feel better."

"It's Monday?"

"No, it's Monday." One of her auburn eyebrows ticked down. "Try not to look so constipated. Why else would I be wearing my uniform?"

Shinji's stomach burbled mutinously beneath his demure print pajamas. Just cramps or stomach acid, but he couldn't give back the limber smile he had just eased out of Asuka. That meant pulling the food cart closer to his bed while Sohryu nodded sagely. Then she made a worried sound in her throat. "I don't know, Shinji. Marinating all day in that slimy plug? You forget all sorts of things after any real stay in an oxygen-depleted environment."

"I'm just tired, Asuka."

"Let's hope so," she said. "God knows you're slow enough as it is."

"If you say so."

"So. So so so so so so so. _So…_" She put down the apple and knife, and anointed his meal with a schmaltzy sweep of her arm. Someone argued persuasively for retaliatory trade sanctions against the Oceanic Union, "what're you waiting for?"

"I…" he started. "I pretty much have to be okay, right?" Asuka started to frown - new world record. "I mean, Ritsuko was supposed to run some tests on me. Because she always does after something happens, but if what you're saying is true, it's already been a whole day."

"What the hell do you mean, 'if'?"

"Then why am I still here?" he asked. "I'm ready for this to be over. I want to go home…"

"Oh, you don't know _what_ you want. Gimme." Asuka leaned in to snatch the orange before he could pluck it out of a cotton fold.

* * *

"I really wish you wouldn't walk behind me like that," said Ritsuko.

Misato stopped pacing long enough to have her eyes comb through Doctor Akagi's short blonde hair. "Faster, please," said Katsuragi, starting up again, stalking her invisible cage.

"Work faster? Of _course_ you meant work faster, you little…" Ritsuko had muttered the last bit and then punched another keystroke, a landmark. Two dozen closed circuit windows scrolled open on the view screen in front of and above her. A gridded monolith of blue screens and salt-and-pepper blizzards. "About you not walking behind me. That's code for 'if I knew I'd end up stuck in the Reserve Control Center with you, I'd have had you scanned first.' Very thinly veiled."

"I'm not one of those sick assholes out there, okay?" said Misato. "Okay? We're a thousand miles from any of the children and we don't even know in which direction, and I'm just…"

Ritsuko leaned back in her chair while the video feeds resolved themselves or snapped to still life portraits of stairwells or parking garages. "You're welcome to go back out there and look for them, if you like."

Misato fingered the jagged hole in the elbow of her Nerv-issue jacket and allowed a swear to leak out of her. "Hyuga almost took my damn arm off…do you see this?"

"We know Shinji's in his recovery suite," said Ritsuko, sighing through her nose as the vid windows began rifling through snapshots like the video board for a game show. Akagi laid her hands on the keyboard. "How much are you willing to bet Asuka and Rei are within spitting distance?"

"I don't want to think about it." Misato slowed down. "Who's scanning _you_, Ritsuko?"

Once Doctor Akagi thawed, she swiveled away from the screen, found Misato's eyes orbiting the space behind her left shoulder, and grinned. "No one."

_Beep_. Ritsuko turned around, tapped the 'Return' key.

The mosaic on the view screen unified, the electronic tiles ceding to a larger, grainier whole…and Asuka was there, snatching an orange from beneath Shinji Ikari's ass.

"Why did you tell me that you locked his door?"

"I did lock his door," Ritsuko said. She shrugged beneath Misato's grip on her shoulder. "Well. Doesn't this just turn your soap brown…"

Misato blinked at first. "And what the fuck does that mean?"

* * *

"What do you mean, 'what do I mean'?" Asuka stopped peeling the orange long enough to spare Shinji a glance. "This is just my take, so don't take it personally."

"Alright," he said.

"Who the hell am I kidding? Shinji, you have no clue what you want out of anything. It's like, uh…" Asuka kept snapping her wet fingers, and then pointed at him when she settled on a code word to describe how hot she was, "my…bearing. Right?"

"Right," he said.

"Natural. Effortless."

Sigh. "Right."

Her hand spun an invisible spool. "I'm trying to say it's self evident."

"I see."

"Then why aren't you looking at me?" she asked.

His eyes leapt up from his calcified legs. "_You_ haven't seen Ritsuko today, have you?"

"No, I haven't seen Ritsuko, or Misato, or Kaji, or the commanders. Or that dick from admin. I don't ever remember you being this anal about getting back home."

"I just don't think there's anything wrong with me," said Shinji.

"So, what, is it the nurse? Is she sneaking in here past visiting hours?"

"No!"

All the tension in her face seemed to migrate to the wound-up corners of her mouth. "She subjecting you to extensive oral examinations?"

"You're so weird…" he muttered.

"You're so gay…"

"What?"

"I said, I promise to rattle some cages for you to see what Akagi's up to. Happy? Just…" Asuka dropped the skin onto the tray as she probed the meat of the orange with a fingernail, "humor me a little more."

"It's not like you ever needed my permission to laugh at me before," said Shinji.

"I didn't say laugh." She scowled, taking umbrage with the way he did absolutely nothing to refute her. "No, seriously. You won't stand up to your dad, your best friends are pro asshats, and you hate the only thing I love…what's so funny about that?"

"You'd hate it too if you went through what I just did."

"Yeah. That's pretty much the most irrelevant thing ever, since I'd never let my guard down like that. _Napkins_…" She swore around a suckled thumb. Shinji wished she had more thumbs. "It's so funny the way you keep forgetting that you're fighting a war, you know that? When you get down to it, Ikari, it's just the Angel, and the city. And you."

"Someone else was in there."

Her face jerked up from a chipped blue saucer. "With me," Shinji explained, but the liquid memory of his time inside the Twelfth Angel slipped down between the wrinkles in his brain. "I haven't told anyone this. She was warm. She was a _she_, and real, and…I was dead. I was gone, and she kept me warm." He shook his head. "I didn't do anything…"

Asuka stared. Laid the naked orange on the saucer, and stared.

"I think it's like that. With all the Evas."

"Not all the Evas," she said.

"But…" he croaked, "the cross-activation tests -"

"Which I took no part in."

"I – okay, but you observed them."

Her shoulder's popped up and down. "Yeah, I watched. You're about to say something stupid."

"But something in Unit-00 stabbed me! From inside my brain…wow." Asuka just turned her palms up and shrugged again. Shinji ignored the queasiness flirting with full-blown nausea and a tinny, disembodied pitch for Yebisu Lite. "Can we just agree that I didn't make Unit-00 total the observation deck?"

"Can we agree that only one person ever tells my _liebchen_ what to do, and you're trying very hard not to stare at her breasts?"

"I'm not trying not to stare at your breasts," said Shinji. "Don't hit me."

"I'm not going to hit you," she said.

"Oh. Is something wrong?"

" No. You saw what you saw. There's nothing to be angry about."

"What's the matter?"

"You wouldn't understand." A huff or a weak sneeze from her. Shinji smelled lavender. "Guess it's appropriate you picked such a weird time to get observant."

Maybe. Or maybe he should've spent the lull in conversation reflecting on how he wasn't aware he'd gotten any more aware. All Shinji could notice was Asuka leaning over him like a galleon figurehead. How that orange slice hovered from her flawless oak fingers. He forced his lips sealed – maybe he _was_ gay.

"God, stop making faces," she breathed. "You know I do weird things when I'm bored."

"I -" His moth clicked shut, popped open. "You don't have to…"

"Make a wish foundation. One day you'll sit next to a fire that burns nostalgia. And you get to tell your great-grandchildren how the greatest pilot who ever lived waited on you hand and foot." Asuka launched her eyebrows high behind her autumn bangs. "If you tell anyone else, I'll kill you."

Despite what some of his teachers, most of his classmates, and all of his coworkers thought, Shinji Ikari wasn't acutely interested in dying. He just wasn't acutely interested in living, which, consequently, might precipitate death. He was neutrally buoyant on a great number of these subjects, and thanks to Asuka, that list now included sanitizing past trysts with beautiful foreign girls for the sake of his great-grandchildren's virgin ears.

It all sounded so preposterous, anyway. So harmless.

His mouth opened.

The door opened.

Her mouth opened. 'Verdammt,' it sounded like, but her face jarred into a blur of pain and flaring tresses before he could ask.

Shinji lost her in the tackled mass wheeling over his knees and shedding cold entrees and limbs as it plunged over the opposite side of his bed. He heard thin bodies slam into the base boards as he flailed at the citrus spray that had maced the hell out of his eyes.

Watercolor blotches spilled upwards from the floor, dividing before it gelled into two heaving shapes. Shinji couldn't tell which one was carving feral, scrawling breaths from the air; just that one offered its back to him as its amorphism snapped into Junoesque boundaries and polyester creases topped off with unruly, impossible blue.

_Rei?_

The other one screamed. Launched itself at Rei and slammed the two of them into his bedside. The locked castors squealed over the floor as Shinji clawed at the sheets to keep from being bucked off. He took a long, flushing blink, and Asuka was digging uppercuts into the First Child's ribcage.

Rei sloughed the barrage off and sprawled backwards but Asuka was selling out, her haymakers driving Ayanami to the far wall and, and…

_In fact…_

Asuka was doing it wrong. Shinji's mind orphaned his legs and arms and tongue to seize on the thought, on the vulgar blows glancing off Rei's elbows and scraping the crown of her head. It was wrong.

_I'll show you how it's done, Asuka._

That derailing hate and spittle that had replaced pinpoint aggression in the dusk burned across Asuka's face…by the German's own crisp, haughty admission, all wrong. It was probably why Rei caught her in the chin with a stool.

Shinji watched Rei watch Asuka go down like a condemned project, watched Rei's alabaster face fill with a voltage that infiltrated her eyes. She faced him; he'd last seen this look when she'd been asked by Mister Iwakura to diagram a sentence on the blackboard.

"Ikari…" She paused, hummingbird eyelids flittering as

_A•su•ka needs a doc•tor_

she dabbed at her scalp. She came away with bloody currency she rubbed between her thumb and forefinger. A c-note trickled down Rei's forehead.

"R-Rei…you" _should just shut up, oh, don't be a part of this, you_ "should probably get that looked at."

"There's no time. Get up. I will explain la-"

Rei stopped talking and started levitating, which was news to her, too. She flung her arms out to control her pitch, but Asuka had a sure grip around the back of Rei's knees. Right up until she dumped the pale girl onto the MedMECH loitering in the corner. The dumpy little droid toppled over, cooing as its contents skated across the floor.

Rei waded crookedly through spilt gauzes and aspirin, fresh linens and bouffant caps. Hypodermic needles. Shinji thought about asking if she was okay, but he'd only get those red flecks and that broken cough of hers. Thank God Asuka swooped behind her to make it better. Shinji tried hard to see the charity behind her sickled frown and its bleeding edge, or the hand towel she snapped around Rei's windpipe.

_I'll show you how it's done if you just_ "stop…"

Asuka emulated the gleaming pearl snarl tugging on her busted lip and wrenched the white cloth, determined to pass basic seamanship through Ayanami's neck. Rei's cheeks bloomed a rare exquisite rose as Asuka rode her down into forced oblivion.

Which was okay. Someone would step in. Any moment now, Doctor Akagi or Kaji would pry the girls apart and then look on him with that diluted pity.

Rei got tired of waiting and launched the back of her head into Asuka's face. Sohryu shouted and scuttled off the electric girl, watching as carmine ichor started to pool from her nose into a cupped hand. Rei breathed luxuriously.

Asuka just breathed; then she wasted a second to scoop up the paring knife, and wasted another second slipping the business end of it into Rei's back. Ayanami's spine arched so splendidly that Shinji could have strung hemp from the top her head to her tailbone. He still wasn't used to hearing her scream.

Didn't bother Asuka, already holding the supply drawer she'd wrenched out of the MedMECH, winding it up behind one of her mangled neural clips…

_No no no no no no no turn around look out look "_OUT."

Rei brought her arms up and whirled. By the time her hair and skirt caught up with the rest of her, the broadside of the drawer had mailed her to the foot of Shinji's bed. He couldn't place Rei beyond the porcelain calf that popped up over the bed frame, but Asuka plunged down after her, the ordinance behind her blue eyes suddenly accurate. At least Sohryu was smiling, again.

_Wasn't I going to punish her?_

That wasn't quite right, was it? No. He should let Asuka know so she could give her fists a rest. So she didn't have to enjoy this so much…

"BLEED LIKE YOU MEAN IT, YOU CLOCKWORK BITCH! YOU'R ALWAYS IN MY FUCKING WA-"

A wet _snick_ cut through Asuka's words. Replaced them with a bubbling squelch. She came up over the footboard for air, eyes so wide she could've been trying to breathe through them, and it might've helped if she'd quit choking herself.

Shinji half expected to hear water crack open below her as she fell away and Rei replaced her, swaying upright like switchgrass in a stiff breeze. Then Ayanami spat a wad of strawberry phlegm, swiped at a marbled cheek with the back of her hand, and staggered to the door.

_Echizen over Kunimitsu_ vibrated across his skull. Three sets to two. Right on, set and match, expertly contested to the hilt. Damn good show, lad. None of that, now, no. Head high. You can get up, now, "Asuka…?"

She must not have heard him; Rei hadn't stopped rooting through a tennis bag he hadn't noticed until then. Frigid tributaries funneled into his legs as he moved them – he wouldn't be ignored. "_Asuka_."

Shinji shed the covers wrapped around his legs, shivering as he swam over to the footboard. Not feeling anything when he peered over.

It wasn't her. Too pale. That was it, the pallor that burbled out through her fingers in silent, liquid ribbons and stranded her blue eyes in a desert of achromatized flesh. And it was the sibilating breaths that staggered past her lips like water over flaccid gills, less and less a means of fomenting textured innuendo and insults or accents. Things like voice had been pruned as the business of simply being consumed her.

Asuka wasted her eyes on him. Maybe. He couldn't tell, because they'd lost their precision. He needed a closer look to be sure.

"No, Ikari." Shinji had interpreted Rei's bruised whisper by the time he knelt by Asuka's head. Tidal scarlet glided from his knees and broke over auburn shoals.

He still couldn't tell if Asuka was looking at him

"Get away from her."

because the clutter was gone. The strength that had crowded her brow and teemed brazenly in the spokes of her irises had vacated, sucked into the vast, dilated blackness in the centers of her eyes.

Asuka wasted her breath on him, out from blue lips fumbling noiseless words

"Get away from her, Ikari."

that yoked themselves over his neck and yanked him down to her mouth. Shinji listened, and watched the peaks of her chest crumble.

"Pilot Ikari."

He'd been imagining Asuka's lips on him, on a dedicated hi-fi synaptic loop, since they'd kissed. These brain flicks never ended with her biting him. But the real Asuka always surprised Shinji. And this little pressure on his earlobe, it was a dying thing that bled off as her teeth released him - as damp elfin fingers hooked into the crook of his elbow,

"Listen to me…"

and wrenched him away from Asuka and the paring knife shedding a bloody archipelago next to her hip.

"Shinji" smelled lavender.

_Weren't you going to punish her?_

He shut down or came on. Either way, Shinji noticed how Rei's bruised neck guided her throat down to the depression nestled between her collar bones. He noticed how he placed the smiling edge of the knife there.

"She was going to eat you," said Rei.

Shinji watched the blade fall between several stories of them and throw a tantrum at her hopelessly ruined white canvas shoes. He watched her shoes. Rei's slight pigeon toe was too precious for words.

* * *

"Diethyl ether, a colorless general anesthetic," said Rei. She held up a small burgundy vial and sniffed its baster before recapping it. She handed it to Shinji and walked back to her bag. "She had doped the orange using a hypodermic needle and masked the smell with her perfume. Due to its low boiling point, the ether would have vaporized in your mouth once you had masticated the orange. Once you had been incapacitated, she would have consumed you at her leisure…I can't hear you."

Shinji doubted Rei needed good ears to line up the notched sites on her hand gun, or to pocket that extra magazine. People prepared to war in funny ways. Ha ha.

As she brushed past in one crooked stride, he found himself staring at the tennis bag bucking across her ass. "I said is someone coming for me? It – because you were saying that –"

"Assume all persons informed of your present location following the recovery of Unit-01 from the Sea of Dirac," said Rei.

"Alright…isn't that everyone?"

Rei reached the window, where widescreen dusk cooked her to a crisp silhouette, and swept her face from one corner to the other. "The location of hospitalized active duty pilots is limited to Class One officers and relevant medical and security personnel. However, it is safer to assume everyone." Her profile twisted, became slight. "Where are your shoes?"

"I don't, I don't know -"

"Where are your shirt and pants?"

"I don't know where any of my things are, okay?"

Rei flattened against the early evening so that her eyes massacred stray motes of light that wandered in front of her. Shinji looked at the floor between them where nothing moved, and he did not scream.

"I did not do this out of…dislike." Her voice approached and her fingers entered view as they unhooked a black plastic plug from Asuka's ear. Rei froze for a moment and then tossed it back to the floor. Her voice tumbled past him. "I dispatched her because she demonstrated a clear and present danger. That is all…I can't hear you."

_I said_ "Can't you even call her by her name?"

Nothing. Shinji waited, though, even as the room became a stinging wet blur that drowned Rei in complicit silence. Even pivoting towards Rei and the door, he was killing seconds or hours of this dream he could see and smell, and that could bleed all over him.

Why wouldn't someone wake him the hell up?

Shinji could never imagine Rei hesitating, yet now he could see her starting sentences in her head to stop them, could see the silk cords of muscle beneath her hand bundle around the pistol grip. He was a little embarrassed for her.

"Dry your eyes, Shinji." There. The final, reworked product. Satisfied with it, Rei looked forward and fronted the exit. "You'll need them to see where you are going."

End of Chapter 1

A/N: I can't really say much before thanking FreshC and FlyByWire for indulging me this lunacy for the past year or so. Concept, execution, stuff…yeah. My foster betas. Thank you. A lot.

I'd originally meant for this to be ready by Halloween. Of 2007. So, this last year? I'd like to think I spent it doing things to improve how I write – deleting extra words, extra sentences, paragraphs and scenes; minimizing adverb usage; employing effective word order and parallel structure. Blah, blah, and blah. I'll say nothing more. Right now, I'm just glad to be offering something up for public consumption. Trick or Treat!

As I've stated on my profile page, I have completed Chapters 2 and 3, and will type and publish them in short order, preferably on or a few days after Halloween. Then I'm going to write something else. If people are still having the readability issues with Story Number Ten that they've had with my past stories, I'm scrapping the second half. I just don't think it would be worth it. I have other, better story ideas, and I would like to get to them before I get sick of fan fiction.

Random A/N: I don't hate Asuka. I don't hate any of the characters. I don't absolutely love any of them, either. I like it that way.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Story Number Ten: Chapter 2

By MidnightCereal

Shinji had been following Rei for ten minutes and could still taste the copper tang on his breath. He wandered how the smell had followed him down the hall until he read his rust-colored palms and then stopped reading his rust-colored palms.

As barren as Nerv's thoroughfares were, as far as their distant junctions pinched into singularities and dissipated noise, they still had managed to latch on to reminders of what had just happened; it was Nerv's white hum of seamless machines, looking, listening, chatting amongst themselves in hidden fiber optic arteries.

He certainly wouldn't forget by following Rei, to whom 'explain later' meant walking very fast, snapping wired gazelle glances left and right and aft, and not explaining anything.

Rei did occasionally dole out anecdotes or philosophy, truisms she undoubtedly fact-checked before allowing others to reflect on and tarnish them with their lazy, flawed minds. So maybe she didn't know what to explain. Maybe nothing was worth explaining.

Then she surged through a blinkered intersection and said,

* * *

Caspar begins monitoring an anomaly on Sunday, twenty-two minutes after the destruction of the Twelfth Angel. It is a waveform radiating from a point seven-hundred and twenty meters above the remains of the Sea of Dirac destroyed by Unit-01. It is screened for active and dormant blue patterns and recorded for future analysis after the diagnostic confirms a negative signature. The waveform vanishes from the AIS on Mount Futago at 2208 hours.

Technical Division Three designates the waveform ISE-370 at 0700 hours, Monday, by which time several Nerv personnel have called in requesting sick leave of have been admitted into Nerv Medical to treat dizziness, stomach cramps, hunger pains, or mild to severe nausea. No correlation between the waveform and the sicknesses is suspected. Division Three's preliminary findings go live on the global Nerv plexus at 0916 hours.

By 1030 hours, Monday, at least sixty-two personnel suffer from dizziness or gastrointestinal maladies. Major Katsuragi complies with Nerv Medical Assistant Chief Furuya's recommendation of base-wide precautions against astrovirus, noravirus, and rotavirus. By 1130 hours, ninety-seven have been admitted to Nerv Medical, whose staff is being inundated and exhibiting the aforementioned symptoms. Major Katsuragi mobilizes our liaison office to the World Health Organization.

The Second Child and I arrive separately for post-sortie synchronization tests. We are both reportedly informed of the medical crisis and cancellation of our tests, and that we are to be escorted to Central Dogma by Section 2.

Central Dogma receives the first reports of provoked and unprovoked physical altercations among personnel at 1309 hours. No discernable geographic pattern to the outbreak of violence has been identified. To ease surveillance and security concerns, Major Katsuragi orders Section 2 to escort you to the emergency medical room in Central Dogma.

The first death is reported at 1319 hours. There are no eyewitnesses to corroborate the coroner's suspicions of cannibalism. Major Katsuragi implements readiness level Delta from this time forward.

I arrive at Central Dogma at 1330 hours, at which time Lieutenant Aoba hails the escort team en route to your medical suite; they do not respond. Attempts to raise the Second Child's retrieval group are also unsuccessful; Pilot Sohryu does not answer her cellular phone or order over TacNet, and is last observed proceeding in the direction of Nerv Medical, alone. Doctor Akagi remotely locks all points of egress to your suite.

By 1400 hours, the sick number in the hundreds. Tokyo-3's emergency city council cites the mutual quarantine policy in its refusal to admit Nerv affiliates to any of its municipal or private hospitals. Fights break out among the affected in and around Nerv Medical facilities. Reports of cannibalism cannot be verified. Renewed attempts to contact the Second Child fail.

The Magi identify ISE-370 as one of seven candidates for causation, due to verbiage in its report hypothesizing a link between the waveform's frequency and abnormal nerve and endocrine functions. At 1440 hours, the Command Staff summons Maho Kamakura, Chief of Technical Division Three, and Hitomi Zenzo, author of the report, to an emergency conference.

Kamakura's and Zenzo's bodies are among thirteen discovered in the West Campus Cafeteria at 1452 hours. There is evidence they had all overeaten to death. There are no eyewitnesses to corroborate the coroner's suspicions of cannibalism.

Coroner Joseph Fujitsu commits suicide at approximately 1506 hours.

It is past 1530 hours. Lieutenant Hyuga removes an L-bracket from beneath his terminal and slices his arm down to his ulna. He is physically restrained from chewing the exposed flesh and stabilized in the emergency medical room.

PET scans reveal that his receptors have ceased relaying glucose levels to his hypothalamus; eating normal food no longer sates his sensation of hunger. Subsequent scans for Lieutenant Ibuki and Sergeant Yagami confirm identical, albeit less pronounced brain functions.

The Second Child remains unaccounted for and is presumed hiding in Nerv Medical.

Doctor Akagi predicts a causal link between the severity of the symptoms and the level of exposure to ISE-370. Upon being contacted to confer, Chief Furuya is found in the specimens lab, and witnessed by all persons in Central Dogma, selectively consuming blood and tissue samples. Real time inventory confirms he is consuming your samples.

The Magi predict with ninety-nine percent confidence that the abnormal receptors will acknowledge glucose molecules originating from your body, thus sating the hunger of those affected.

At 1640 a security breech prompts a controlled Magi system shutdown, which fails. Doctor Akagi successfully executes a Type 666 firewall, but the results from the Magi, the digital feed of Chief Furuya, and your Nerv identification card photograph are distributed to all duplicate Magi systems via the global Nerv plexus and seventy-eight thousand network servers throughout the Pacific Rim. The information becomes available on the public domain at 1715 hours. The information is disseminated by over eleven-thousand media agencies around the world.

1730 hours. Under protest from Major Katsuragi, Commander Ikari orders Nerv Medical isolated from First Branch proper and the Geospatial Annex. Bakelite is injected into all suites aside from your own, and into all examination, recovery, emergency, and medical storage rooms.

Vertical and parallel command structures rapidly deteriorate in Central Dogma. A fight breaks out at com station 2, before encompassing the entire primary control center. Several dozen personnel desert their posts. Sub-commander Fuyustski is shot in the torso and is unresponsive. Commander Ikari evacuates Central Dogma. His whereabouts are unknown.

I fill an unused gym bag in the emergency medical room with first aid, along with Lieutenants Hyuga and Aoba's service pistols and ammunition. At 1750 hours, I evacuate Central Dogma with Major Katsuragi and Doctor Akagi. The doctor remotely locks all points of egress to Central Dogma and secretly begins the transfer of emergency operations to the Reserve Control Center.

I leave them and come for you. That is all.

Are you hungry?

* * *

Shinji didn't have to think for long, which was perfect. "Now that you've said something…I'm getting there. Yeah."

"I don't have any food," said Rei.

Alrighty. So long as he had help digesting everything Rei had just rammed down his throat. He found no such charity beyond his sloppy reflection, etched in the galvanic luster of the walls. There weren't any windows in this corner or Nerv, no cork board bulletins soliciting exercise bikes or year-old futons, or any of the new GPS kiosks Misato had stumped so hard for.

_YOU ARE HERE_

Which was away from all those pesky employees: the soccer moms, car owners, subletters; steeped in heat and high electric whines, and according to Rei, far from anyone who might try to hurt him. Far from Misato.

"I did, however, procure a plugsuit," said Rei, "should you wish to change…"

Shinji looked at his feet, pink from slapping the cold steel floors – he'd already stubbed his toe on an expansion joint. "No, I, uh, no. Why didn't you stay with them?"

"I suspect Major Katsuragi and Doctor Akagi of developing the same symptoms as those affected. I do not trust them to keep you safe."

"Makes sense," said Shinji, even as he watched his reflection shake its diffuse head. "No, it doesn't. If you wanted to -"

"It gets hot here," said Rei.

"—to keep me safe, why take me out where you say everyone wants to kill me?"

"Not kill. Eat."

"Um. Sorry?"

"Headquarters harbors sublevels, storage rooms, and emergency bunkers accessible to only high-ranking personnel - Command staff and network specialists who maintain the security architecture. We must assume Doctor Akagi or Major Katsuragi has divulged the location of your recovery suite in Nerv Medical to affected parties that threatened them harm. We must proceed to lower, more secure levels."

"We didn't _see_ anybody outside of my room, Rei. All I saw were…" mismatched arm and leg strata; pressed cheeks and uniformed backs caught on spider webs of fractured office windows; flesh and blood and broken bone fossils newly preserved in bakalite. So no one. Nothing. He had been looking forward the whole time, locked on the scarlet patch seeping through between Ayanami's shoulders.

"What did you see?" Rei had spun, was walking backwards now and staring.

"It…doesn't matter," he said. As promised, the sour heat of silicon processing permeated him. "You should have just left me there…"

The little part between her lips sealed up, the bruised flesh compressing before she spun back and veered into the right wing of a T-junction. Then over digitized whistling that cycled behind a phalanx of hulking doors, "I realize this is a difficult prospect to accept, but you must understand: you were not being saved for the sanctity of your life, but preserved for your eventual consumption…"

Rei paused for effect. No, she never did that. All business. Nothing but the facts, no matter what they took from you. "The incident with the Second Child is proof of this."

"B-but, _no_, Asuka was, you don't…" Shinji couldn't keep the hiccup or the bubble of decayed laughter from escaping. "_That's just how she is._ You picked a fight with her. A _fight_. You don't live with us, that's how she…you don't understand…"

His shoulders crashed down as Rei powered through her slight limp and picked up speed. Shinji was sweating now. "Why is this happening?" he asked.

"The Twelfth Angel may have used your captivity to analyze human physiology, though a link between the Angel and ISE-370 hasn't been identified. It is more likely that the waveform was an energy weapon that targeted you and First Branch personnel. The attack on the Magi supports the latter theory."

Block lettering on the walls. **ISO-6**, whatever the hell that meant. Nothing made any sense. "That's not…but I was just sitting in the stupid plug. I was dreaming. Dying…"

""Nerv's defense against the Angels has inevitably raised its profile to domestic and foreign entities," said Rei. "Hostile factions such as the Oceanic Union or Yu Lin Black may have devised ISE-370 to cripple United Nations or Japanese interests, or to publically assert an ideology."

"By having people _eat_ me? How could that help anyone?"

Rei slowed down. "There is always the possibility that maliciousness may have been the intent in and of itself," she said. "Mankind's greatest enemy is man himself."

"I…alright," said Shinji. "Okay," he said. "But…why?"

Rei stopped walking. "I don't know."

She squared up to the only human-sized door in this entire acrylic-smelling branch of Nerv; Shinji had forgotten Rei was packing until the pistol drew up in her raw knuckles. Her free hand twisted the door handle and yanked hard so that the compartment vomited cable trays and Maya Ibuki and ergonomic chairs.

"This wasn't in your story," said Shinji.

* * *

And then Ritsuko framed them. They came up on the view screen, two Children and her kohai in a God's-eye portrait. Akagi zoomed in as Rei stooped to remove the gag from Maya's mouth. Misato stood and watched Ibuki's eyes spin into grainy white saucers.

"You know how she probably did it?" said Ritsuko.

Misato shook her head free from the pixel-flicker to peer down at the seated woman. "What?"

"Asuka. How she got into Shinji's med suite."

"Oh. Don't do this." Misato watched the screen again. Maya pressed herself against the wall as best she could with duct-taped arms and legs.

"She probably shoots the agents. Reaches…" Akagi extended an arm over the control panel. "Reaches up into his coattails to rip the sidearm out of its holster. Puts it in his back before he knows it. Bang, bang, before he knows it. He and his partner don't know they're dead."

"You don't see them. You never…"

"Hmm?"

Misato shook her head. "Asuka was all frame. She was going to be five-foot ten, like, five years from now, sure. But the girl was a coat hanger."

"I see," said Ritsuko.

"No, you…" said Misato, "you never watched." She shook her head again, slower.

"I watched them plenty. I'm watching them now." Rei slipped a flat black shape out from her bag and laid it on the floor. Produced a knife and loomed. Maya shrank away after a skip in the feed. "Fact: Asuka gets away from her escorts, who probably do horrible things to each other. She takes one of their ear pieces, a direct passive feed into Central Dogma, which is too far away to risk. I'd locked Shinji's door by the time she reaches it, so she waits out the crazies in an empty room."

Rei pulled the blade through Maya's bound wrists and ankles. The lieutenant kicked up into a sitting position, her mouth practicing round, stuttering shapes. "Commander Ikari can't finish ordering the quarantine before Asuka clears her sanctuary. Exposed, but that's better than being flash-frozen in Bakelite, isn't it?"

"Ritsuko." Misato tried breathing over the skip in her voice.

"Asuka's lurking when Maya remotely unlocks Shinji's door. That green light goes on in the jamb, and she walks right in." Ritsuko wagged one of her long index fingers. "I'm a bloodhound when it comes to confluences of circumstance. You have to give me that, at least."

"Shut up and get your story straight," said Misato.

"I'm just stating the obvious, here." Doctor Akagi closed her emerald eyes and sighed. "You might as well have a seat, then. It looks like they're giving me enough time to brainstorm."

"Don't tell me what to do," Misato whispered. She looked up long enough to see Rei drop the flat shape into Maya's lap while Shinji hung back, making and unmaking lo-def fists. By the time Rei rose to full height, Katsuragi had crumpled into the chair next to Ritsuko, bent over at the waist, with her face cupped in her hands.

* * *

Maya Ibuki shivered, but was otherwise paralyzed; it was how Rei talked down to her, that low prophetic venom Shinji had never heard the girl administer.

"You will use that," Rei pointed at the powerbook coasting in Ibuki's lap, "to grant us access to pathways we have been denied by the base wide lockdown. We will proceed past depth minus three hundred. Prepare accordingly."

Shinji couldn't tell if Maya had heard Rei, as the tech only smeared sweat and tears on a starched beige cuff. Then Maya stared up into Rei's machine-tooled apathy, and proceeded to melt all the way down.

"That's…that's it? You…you, you, you, you kidnap me…you _brain_ me…you tie me up and lock me in that little sweat box with no water or food and I have to use the bathroom, I really gotta go and I can hardly damn breathe and – like a dog! A _dog_ – and people are dying, they're dying out there and, and, and then you come back just bathed in gore, and these _bruises_, and with this, this _blood_ all in your hair and nails and that's _it_ and you don't even have the decency to tell me why and you want me to open more doors for you! You, you you you just, you, you…fucking doors!"

"Yes," said Rei.

"You already have access!" Maya exploded. "_You_ have access! You can go anywhere you damn well please, so go!"

"Beyond her own remote, retinal and card access, Doctor Akagi had revoked all security clearances after evacuating Central Dogma. I doubt she would cooperate in the event I located her. I'm also uncertain of her mental and physical capacity." Somehow, Rei sharpened the dullness of her downward gaze. "I am, however, certain of _your_ condition, Lieutenant."

One second passed where Maya did not know what the girl was talking about – right before her dark eyebrows locked with comprehension. Ibuki's chestnut eyes swiveled over to Shinji, and…

And Rei was nuts. No doubt. Shinji saw nothing beyond the anxiety that crumpled Maya's simple, pleasant features. Not much at all.

Maybe some self-pity, like a wino hoping to score sympathy yen with a cheap lie. Shinji nearly accepted and filed that away when Maya blinked, and…

She didn't really see him. Like he was poorly lit and she needed his blood to trace him between his heartbeats, and…

"Do _not_ look at him."

Ikari breathed. The world came surging back through the incision made by Rei's command, flooding the space between him and Maya's eyes; fluorescent lights and recycled air warmed his blood. "I recommend plotting a route down to block H3 now, as it will be difficult for you to type while walking."

"Please don't make me get up," said Maya. She pulled an experimental breath, examining the space between her vaulted knees. "I don't feel so good."

"I promise you will feel worse if you defy me again."

Shinji imagined Rei being a fan of promises, of keeping them and carrying them out. This time he fought the glassy bovine numbness beginning to tranquilize him. "You should…probably do whatever she says, Maya."

"Pilot Ikari knows the First Branch is in a state of anarchy," said Rei. "He also knows I will accept neither your refusal to cooperate nor the threat you pose should I release you. If only for self-preservation, do everything I ask of you."

"Self preser…I _told_ them…" Maya lifted then shook her head, offered then retracted her smile. "The moment I saw your psychograph and all that random thought noise-"

The gun barrel gave Maya's forehead a cold, hard kiss, and she screamed.

* * *

After a while, Misato said, "Don't just appeal to his sense of duty. It's not like Shinji doesn't have one, but couch it in honorific or nationalistic terms and his eyes will just glaze over."

"I was planning on something much more guilt-ridden, I'm afraid," said Ritsuko. "And that's why you're going to speak to him, yourself. See? I pay plenty of attention."

"Good."

"No, great, because you'll finally have some control over what's happening. Do you want some water?"

"I'll. Um." Misato swallowed. "I'll be good in a few minutes."

"That's what I'm counting on. When you are, sit up straight – you never pay attention slouched over like that."

* * *

Shinji picked his way over another skeletal shelf toppled onto the chessboard floor. No longer much point in calling the place a convenience store; five floor downs from where Rei had retrieved Maya, it was a mite larger than a phone booth, and had less food. It played better music, though.

Rei supervised the procurement effort, consisting of the highest ranking Lieutenant in Nerv rooting through a ravaged backroom for leftover foodstuffs. Maya had protested bitterly to Rei at having to enter another confined space against her will. But not for long.

The halogen fixtures above popped again, supersaturating the trampled space with light – making it impossible to miss the bloody stigma across Rei's back. Ruby negatives of the wound blotted out swaths of Shinji's retinas when the lights dimmed, nearly blinding him to the large cardboard box that had leapt out from the backroom and skidded to Ayanami's feet.

Ibuki stepped out and over a ravaged Maruchan ramen stand, trying very not hard to hide how pleased she was with herself.

"Open it," said Rei.

Ibuki's smile hovered before collapsing beneath the weight of her own expectations. She bent over the box, ripped open its stapled flaps, and stood back as the First Child took silent inventory. Rei inspected a small plastic packet dangling between her pale fingers. "Do you like to eat potato chips?" she asked.

Silence beyond whispered strains of Yamazaki. Maya was taking an awfully big risk not answering Rei – oh.

"Sure," Shinji said, shrugging. "It's better than nothing, I gue-"

"Plain or rippled?"

"I-I don't really have a preference-"

"Deep-fried or baked?"

He groaned. "It doesn't matter, Rei."

"Salt and Vinegar, Barbeque, or Sour Cream and Onion?"

"He just said he doesn't care!" Then Maya sighed. She reined herself in and pointed at the exit to the shop. "All those partitions I unlocked for us use a strain-hardening adaptive algorithm. If they close again, it'll take me forever to reopen them."

"I am aware of our time constraints, Lieutenant." Rei swung the tennis bag from across her back and onto a raised knee, where she loaded it with an indiscriminate number of snack packs. The bag zipped closed with a pornographic crunch, and Shinji despaired.

"Has to be getting pretty heavy," he mused, not meaning to say it out loud.

"It is still…" Rei fiddled with the strap until it settled between her breasts, "still manageable. Don't worry, I am not as weak as I appear."

"You know I don't think you're weak."

Either Rei didn't believe him, hadn't heard him, or didn't care to as she preoccupied herself with Maya. "Move."

Maya moved. Mechanically trudged towards the stickycrunchymoist adjacent aisle. Once Ibuki flounced over the threshold, Rei hustled after her.

"Wait," he said.

"Step carefully, Shinji, we're leaving."

"How do you know there's not going to be anyone else where we're headed?"

Rei stopped. He caught the bruises on her face in one last epileptic flare: the channel of congealed blood carved above her right eyebrow; the ruptured capillaries in her left eye, their red feelers licking the edge of her iris; the Rosacea-like abrasions jailed behind her exhausted bangs; the pale lavender blush that had conquered her right cheek and was annexing the bridge of her nose.

It was as close to awful as someone could look and still pull off…no, she looked awful.

"I don't," she said.

The final snap of spent power. Depth, color, it all collapsed beneath the weight of darkness.

* * *

"You told me the primary lighting would be functioning, Lieutenant."

Shinji thought that had been implied rather than explicitly stated. A brightly-lit path instead of docile auxiliary lamps recessed at the edges of the ceiling. Of _course_ the primary lights would be working. All the same, they weren't, and Maya was about to get shot in the ass. She mitigated the odds of that happening by facing away from the enormous hermetic bulwark blocking their way. Good for her. "No. No, this should have worked…"

"You told me you were able to ensure egress down to H6, Lieutenant" said Rei, "that we had eleven minutes."

"I know what I told you. God." Maya glowered at the laptop docked at her abdomen, shadows tucking into her brow before she could iron them out. "Just a few minutes, here. My script was working fine, and-"

"No," said Rei.

"But if you just let me _recompile_ I'll use the error message to debug-"

"We cannot afford any more delays, Lieutenant."

"Stop saying it like that. _Lieutenant_. And you didn't have a problem wasting our time in that sad little commissary."

"I had only used the opportunity to procure food. Provisions may be unavailable at lower levels, and we could be isolated for an extended period of time."

"Then let's head back," Shinji said. To both of them. Well, not to Maya, not while her face craned down to Rei's so that her chin buzzed the top of her monitor.

"We can top off our salted potato shards with some potable water," Maya said. "There's lots of that stuff in the utility plant, Rei, which is in the opposite direction."

"That reasoning does not apply to you, Lieutenant, and we must temper our plan of action with an objective assessment of our technical competency."

"I am not incompetent!" Maya yelled. "I'm sick and pissed and scared because you're going to kill me for no good reason!"

"It will be a good reason."

Maya pulled back.

"She didn't mean that," said Shinji.

A miracle: Rei took a breath, a hint. "My commentary on your expertise was not intended as an insult. We gain nothing by denigrating you or your vocation. I merely-"

"Then why did you say it?" Maya tucked her lips over her teeth, waited then unpuckered them and decompressed. "You knew I'd take it the way I did, and you said it anyway. You're not…you're not as smart as you think you are. I'm sorry. I see your prog matrices, Rei, I incorporate them into your core data every Wednesday. We have a chart for you – the Cram Graphical Index. A chart. You're a rote monster and we have the data to prove it. But I guess that's all irrelevant since I have to do whatever you say?"

"Let's just go back. We shouldn't…" _be standing around like this_, Shinji finished to himself. The words floated away from him as Rei gazed at a lone red star shimmering in the coffered black above them. Was that why she wasn't saying anything?

"Are we ignoring Shinji, too?" Maya flicked her bangs in his direction. "I agree with him. I can make another way, and we probably won't even have to leave this floor."

"Try if you must." Rei hadn't looked off the red pinprick floating in the shadows of the ceiling.

"Why don't you just say that you want me to move? Look at me. I'm moving. See? Here I go." Maya clapped the laptop shut before jamming it beneath her arm. She remembered to give Shinji a wide birth as she stormed away from the shut partition, back the way that had came. "Just because you didn't like what I had to say doesn't mean you can afford to be diffi-"

Then tidal waves on rails. Torrents of freight air rampaging down the walls and lapping at Shinji's thin sleeves, roaring towards them and slamming against his eardrums. Funneling into him and howling louder than him. Driving his knees into the floor; Maya's too. The two of them hiding their ears while they waited for the sheet metal thunder to roar away to nothing.

When it finally did, Shinji cracked open an eye, with Rei's blood-black socks tugging at his peripheral vision. Maya unmuffled her ears and reeled from the partition that had shot down from the ceiling and sealed them away from the rest of the floor. She looked a bit pale.

A broadcast from somewhere above him: "We're trapped." Poor Rei, having to state the obvious over the reinforced metal slab still thrumming like an empty cauldron. At first, Maya vibrated with it, hypothermic – it had nearly bitten her in half, after all.

"W-what's that look for?" Ibuki sifted through her teeth. She had nice teeth. Straight, white. Stenographic. "I'd try harder to not kill myself if I was going to ditch you!"

A broadcast from somewhere above him: "Give her a break, Rei. Maya's telling the truth. You should try it some time." Ritsuko, her voice duplicated over TacNet with brass clarity, doped with scorn, which threw Shinji off a little. But here it was, again, "Rote. Monster. Couldn't have said it better myself."

_Try what some time?_

What a fair, utterly vital question. A shame Rei turned to the ether before Shinji could ask it. "You have been observing us," she said.

"More like waiting for you to hike to a relatively safe location before we stepped in. Watching you was part of it, yes."

Someone else now, stumbling through a thatch of static. "It'll all be over soon, Shinji." Misato. He felt his chest inflating, rising. Crashing inward as he coughed out an ache he hadn't known was there. "Hang tight, okay? Rei won't hurt you, she needs you alive."

"Your father needs you alive, if we want to be precise. I'm afraid that you won't like anything I'm about to tell you, but it's…" Ritsuko went dead, her metered silence distancing him from Rei and Maya. Closer to Father. What did he do? "Shinji, do you know what the A-Series Special Declarations are? They're orders from the Diet in Tokyo-2, authorizing emergency actions. At 1100 hours today, you and I – Misato – everyone at Nerv HQ, we were all stripped of any constitutional amnesty; you're no longer a Japanese citizen, Shinji."

It had just rolled off her tongue. Something she'd calculated to a thousand decimal places, he knew.

"Okay." Then he closed his mouth. Rei was undressing him with her eyes or waiting for Ritsuko's words to grind him under tread. Shinji shook his head in the interim.

Ritsuko wheeled on. "So we have a problem. It's the four-thousand Self-Defense Force soldiers and the air support and the jamming domes and artillery they brought with them. And they've infiltrated the base, Shinji. And killing us, here and at Matsushiro. We haven't heard from Mount Futago in over two hours. I believe Misato when she says our security forces have done their best in stalling the advance on Central Dogma, considering they aren't trained extensively for close quarters combat.

"But we're running out of time, here. We might be able to stop the assault if we destroy their logistical capability in the Geofront. So, I'm guessing you see where you come in."

Where did Father come in? Or Maya's double-hemmed lips stitching up all of her opinions? Where did Rei getting really good at that complicit silence thing come in? "No," he said.

"No? Do you think Rei is on our side? On yours?" asked Ritsuko. "Come on, Shinji. If the JSDF weren't so busy destroying my life's work we'd all be helping them. It's your father they're after. He's going to initiate Third Impact. And Rei is taking you to him."

"No…" Well, yes. He could believe it; _No_ just happened to be all Shinji could muster before he forgot how to breathe. _Oh God, Rei, I'm drowning_ was a mouthful, a tad metaphorical. And outside of her apartment, Rei liked precision. She preferred orders, elegant edicts. What a doer. A cutter. Ender. It might kill her to say something unless he told her to. "Rei…"

"Think of the Angels as…a gauntlet. Do you understand? To test man's mettle." Ritsuko paused while Maya looked less and less like she was waiting to be hit by a bus. "Commander Ikari thinks the prize is your mother. He's desperate, or crazy, but right now that's unimportant."

Shinji took tiny sips of malted air that froze halfway over his tongue.

Unimportant. Right now. Whatever you say, right now.

"All we know," continued Ritsuko, "is that if he tries this before we've defeated all the Angels, the SDF won't matter. Nothing will matter. Do you know about Terminal Dogma?" A short, Velcro huff from her. "Never mind. It's why you keep going down. He needs you and Unit-01 with him. The test type acted on your behalf not even two days ago and she'll do it again if Gendo destroys your ego - you don't want him to do that."

Ayanami had plunged her hand into her bag, was calmly stirring potato chips and hydrogel bandages. "Rei!"

"Cut that out," Akagi snapped at him. "She can't answer you because I'm right. All Rei can offer is whatever your father has in store for you. She doesn't care about what happens to you, she doesn't care about happens to anyone."

"Listen to Ritsuko." Misato again, slow. Always slow when she wanted to keep her words from fraying. "Look at what's already happened, Shinji. Think…think about what she did to Asuka."

_No_.

"What did you do to Asuka?" asked Maya. She looked Rei in the eye, then at those handcuffs jangling from the girl's loose fist.

"Against the wall, Lieutenant."

"All the praise in the world won't make up for what your father's going to do," said Misato. "He's going to use you. The real fight is up top, and we need you."

Maya applied herself to a large, composite wall panel, kept inventing these prosthetic, nauseated smiles. "What happened to Asuka? What did you do to her?"

"Place the laptop on the ground. Then sit down and place your arms behind your back."

"Please tell me you didn't kill that girl…" Maya's mistake was in letting her eyes linger on the blood lakes between Rei's topographic pleats. "Oh my God!"

"Ritsuko's going to cut you a path and you'll link up with Captain Inouye halfway to Cage Six." Rei threaded the handcuff through the guardrail running behind Maya's back. Shinji found himself filtering the image until he could stomach all the dirty black things swimming in Maya's face.

"Don't worry about Rei," said Misato, "if she'd been authorized to kill you, she would've done so the moment we boxed you in."

"Unlikely. I could not have verified outside involvement unless Doctor Akagi had first spoken."

"An admission?" laughed Ritsuko.

"A demonstration." Rei finished ratcheting Maya to the guardrail and hobbled over to Shinji. Red eyes pierced him from behind raccoon bruises. "Brace yourself, Ikari."

"For what?" he asked.

For her punching him in the nose as hard as she possibly could, duh. If she could have hit him harder, the liquid flashbulbs popping on his eyelids wouldn't have cared. Shinji didn't care either, because, ow.

"Leave him alone!" someone shouted. Someone else towed their finger across his bloodied upper lip and tamped away.

"What're you doing? Don't!" Now that was Maya. That was her fighting her restraints and gasping and scraping metal. Her voice, draining into her throat and boiling.

"Open your mouth, Lieutenant."

_Open your eyes._

Shinji winked incessantly, let his rinsed vision synch with a distant, muffled outrage. There, where Rei was swabbing her fingers inside of Maya's mouth.

Even as Ayanami spun and stayed him with a palm against his stomach, he was reducing her touch to a vicarious thrill. Stock fantasy. He'd really wanted a closer look at Maya, but the woman had folded over, slumped and twisted like a broken awning.

"Is she alright?" he asked.

"Stand back and watch," said Rei.

"Watch if she's alright?" He did that. Found nothing promising in Maya's crooked shoulders.

"This won't prove a damn thing," Ritsuko huffed. "What are you waiting for, Ikari? ETA for SDF to breech Central Dogma is twelve minutes – eleven minutes. Ayanami's just buying time, because when Misato and I are dead you'll be on your own. And then Rei and your father are going to do to everyone what she's already done to Asuka. What you let happen. You think failure is telling the Commander to go to hell? That's just one of your twelve-thousand complexes talking.

"Failure is doing nothing. It's letting what happened to Asuka happen to everyone on Earth. Letting it happen without lifting a finger. That's total, abject failure, Shinji, and it's about to become you. This is it. This is Gendo Ikari's legacy, and now it's yours. You finally share something with him, just like you always wanted."

And out of the corner of Shinji's eye, and upswell from the floor. And a noise – a crude distortion.

He blinked at Maya, springing forward to bite down on the space between them, where she wanted any part of him to be. Savaging air with her nice white teeth. Using up the slack in her shoulders and tumbling backwards. Fashioning blood bangles into her busy wrists. Kicking at him. Flailing at him. Each limb, each joint, each muscle, every neuron, carrying out its own unique tantrum in his honor. Reaching an armistice with herself, collecting her legs beneath herself. Lunging again. Silk drool slinging out to him as the cuffs choked her wrists again and snapped her back to the baseboard. She stayed there.

Her mouth hung open, allowing a sandpaper push-pull of air until Maya could furnish noise.

A crude distortion. A miscarriage of sound.

_Watch_.

* * *

Ritsuko stood up. "Take off your safety, cowgirl. Caspar's been running our probable escape trajectories for the past ten minutes."

Misato reached behind her head. Dark tresses fanned across her back as she pulled away the hair band. "We should have just told him the truth."

"Oh, shut up," sighed Ritsuko. "Do you want your security privileges restored or not?"

* * *

The light left – the red one Rei had gazed at before Ritsuko and Misato had lied to him. Upped and nova'd. Shinji felt the loss for some reason, an emptiness pinching his belly. That's hunger for you. People got hungry. Maya got hungry.

"Do you think…are they still watching us?" he asked.

"I don't know," said Rei. She crouched next to the pill bug posing as Maya and wasting Maya's breath with fetal, sputtering noises. "What matters is their pursuit of you, its intent. Do you understand, now?"

Yes.

"Shinji?"

"…Yes."

"There is no invasion force," she said.

"Yeah."

Rei stopped breathing, fostering a collateral silence in exchange for his obedience. She held it long enough. Let him off the hook and pinpointed the huddled epicenter of Maya Ibuki, still racked by aftershocks. Still fractured and listing and unsound. "Are you calm, now?"

"Oh," explained Maya.

"Listen well, Lieutenant."

Maya nosed out of the shell she'd cobbled together and tilted forward, her momentum evicting the words. "Oh…it just. It fits…"

"Lieutenant."

"Why do you fit? Shinji…?"

"You will not speak to him." Rei had a talent for glacial edicts, inertial consonants and vowels. Or the swelling in her lips meant she had to really push the syllables through her teeth. "You will communicate all information through me. If you speak to him, I will punish you."

"Okay," said Maya. "Okay."

"Do not touch him – if you do so, I will kill you. If you approach him, I will kill you. If you refuse to assist us, I will kill you.

"I will kill you, Maya Ibuki."

End of Chapter 2

A/N: If Chapter 2 did not clear up some of the confusion expressed in the reviews for Chapter 1, then I will try to answer questions posed in my livejournal – my username is the same as my pen name, but all lowercase. I'll deal with any and all typos tomorrow. You know what time it is?

Random A/N: People said lots of things in this chapter.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Story Number Ten: Chapter 3

By MidnightCereal

"Aida Residence."

"I know that. I mean, it's me. Sorry."

"Holy God, you're alive. It's been days, Ikari."

"I know, right?"

"If that's who you really are."

"I…Kensuke, who else would I be?"

"Someone who's using a number I don't recognize, for starters."

"It's Rei's phone, so I wouldn't think you would and…look, I'm in between things down here."

"Rei's phone?"

"That's what I said."

"Rei Ayanami is letting you use _her_ phone?"

"Are you going to turn this into a thing? Don't…don't be weird, now. It's really kinda important…"

"Between things down where, Ikari?"

"I'm at work in…I don't know anymore. I'm doing tests. You know how they are. Tests."

"Not the ones you're probably talking about – the important kind."

"Well, they keep telling me they're important."

"The _really_ _kinda_ important kind."

"No, I was talking – this is so – am I on TV? Of course not. I'm crazy, right?"

"This is so _what_? Wait, you're on TV? No you're not. I don't get it."

"Me neither, but…anything? Anything about me? Forget it. The answer's no."

"Just let me check."

"It's not really a check-and-see type of situation."

"What type of situation is it, Shinji?"

"It's not one."

"Oh, Christ."

"What? _What?_"

"NHK, dude. That Ayame chick, her BioSines is on for like the sixth time. Why haven't I noticed how fat she got?"

"She was depressed or something."

"That's what happened? Like you needed another reason to keep letting Asuka win at Uno."

"Heh heh. Yeah."

"Don't tell her I said that."

"I won't."

* * *

Shinji thumbed the 'End' key just as Maya murmured to Rei. Something about outstanding balance as Ibuki ducked behind a vending machine thrumming in the metal gloam of Level Something Sector Something. He could hear Maya pecking at her notebook while Rei contemplated the machine's precipice of almond pocky and malomars. Too bad the steel crosshatch across the display case had ruled out shooting the plexiglass – he felt like celebrating.

"It's not like I'm going to say, 'I told you so'," said Shinji.

"You already have," said Rei.

"Um." He tried harder to tamp down the linoleum corners of his mouth. "All I'm trying to say is…we have options, now. Aida says nothing is happening up top. This is a good thing, it has to be."

The cell phone shimmied in his palm.

* * *

"That's a negative for TBS and NTV."

"Uh. Great. I appreciate it."

"For a second I thought I caught you on TSC, but it was just some schoolgirl with short hair and no boobs."

"What a relief."

"I could probably give a little more relief if you told me what trouble you're in."

"I had this feeling, that's all."

"Okay. But if you were, you'd tell me?"

"If it was a really big deal, we probably wouldn't be talking, now."

"And it's not a big deal."

"I shouldn't have even called - it was silly."

"No no no. Yeah, listen, Eleventh Sphere tournament, tonight. I did it, Shinji, I pulled a _dia_ squad. Clinched a fourth seed. Does that blow you or does that blow you?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah…what?"

"…it blows me."

"Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!"

"They have to check me out of here and everything. Don't wait up."

"Think about it, dude. We drew some world-class shit this time. Regions one and three. You're my three-fourteen, Ikari. It'll be epidemic!"

"Sounds fun."

"Think about it."

* * *

Shinji imagined the inside of Rei's sport tote as some denim geologic record, even before she gorged the poor thing with a litter of sticky buns and muffin stumps and some donut holes, and re-zipped it. So, yeah, magic. "Traveling back to the surface will only increase the likelihood of conflict with affected persons. Individuals and roving groups," she said. "It's inadvisable."

"You're not giving this a fair chance. You, me, and Asuka did this before, right? And we weren't even trying that day. We just went up."

Rei _pinched_ the debit card between her thumb and forefinger. And looked at him. "The circumstances of the Ninth Angel incident and the current dilemma are inherently different-"

"I-I get that, I-"

"-and equating them to rationalize an impulsive and foolish endeavor is intellectually dishonest."

"Sorry, okay? Sorry." Shinji bit his tongue, wishing he could beg off her eyes - you could do that with Asuka. "No one said it wouldn't be dangerous. I'm not saying that. Misato called it, um, reasonable chance, or…"

"Acceptable risk. I admit that Major Katsuragi has a…penchant for meeting success in high-risk conditions…" Shinji got his mercy look-off. Now Rei stared at a lone packet of red licorice clinging to the edge of its dispenser rack, "but she is not here."

The phone, again. Kensuke again.

* * *

"Nine o' clock. My place - Tourney Central. I knew I was forgetting to tell you something."

"I really can't promise you anything."

"I understand, Ikari."

"Thanks."

"It's not really tests, is it?"

"It – yeah, it is. It is."

"You can tell me. Places like Nerv always have official responses set up. Just in case."

"Just in case what?"

"You tell me, Ikari."

"Tell you what?"

"There's always something. Something's always breathing fire on that place. Angels or hackers or girl scouts or something. Just because it's a fortress doesn't mean nothing ever goes wrong."

"Nothing went wrong."

"It's another Angel, isn't it?"

"It's not an Angel."

"What is it, Ikari?"

"I don't think you're listening to me."

"So you're stuck there for absolutely no reason at all. And why would they do that?"

"That always happens here. No one ever tells me anything."

"Shinji, I think you're lying."

"No, I'm not."

"You're lying, and you don't have to, because…who am I gonna tell? I break code on my lunch break. Section 2's got me numbered, I know that."

"Kensuke."

"I know people, I'm not even joking. I can get you tickets, phones, email. Need a place to crash? Hey, you can-"

"They're calling me."

"You're my friend. We're supposed to be friends!"

"I have to go."

"Tell me what's wrong."

"Kensuke."

"Just tell me where you are. We'll meet up and figure something out. I won't tell anyone, not Touji. No one. _Tell_ _me_."

"I have to go. I have to…"

"Tell me where you are."

* * *

Shinji ended the call and bartered with Rei. Cell phone for sticky bun. He squelched the gymnastic sickness in his throat while sloughing off the plastic wrapper and congealed, tectonic frosting - food shouldn't make its own slurping sounds. Shinji focused on the scattered typing behind the vending machine, instead. Then on that muffled buzzing in Rei's palm.

"Don't answer that," he said.

* * *

Misato looked about the metal gangway as she and Ritsuko tamped across it. High above them, catwalks cut across each other, racing into the sheer wall of upper levels stepped like year-3000 pueblos. Other platforms crisscrossed beneath them, growing longer and thinner until they stretched over the yawning depths below like spare strands of silk. "There's no end to this place…" she said.

"Three-hundred and thirty meters from floor to ceiling, officially," said Ritsuko.

"There's a floor?"

"Maybe. I don't know, that number's for the tourists. They were talking about converting it all into a Class Ten high bay; you know how many precipitators it'd take to remove sixteen-thousand particles from a cubic centimeter of air?"

Misato sighed. "Jesus Christ."

"I'm sorry," said Ritsuko, "the next time I describe an electrostatic process to you, I'll try not to use so many words and numbers."

"The cross, asshole."

The rust red crucifix welded high on the wall at the end of the gangway. Ritsuko pinched the controller pouched in her lab coat pocket to wipe away the door ahead. They passed beneath the cross into navy darkness, where Ritsuko thumbed the controller and sealed off the envelope of light from the high bay. "How are you feeling?"

Misato trailed her fingers along a wall, dipping them into the crevices between recessed storage modules, teasing the lip of an electric panel flitting dim red text. She cleared her voice over the drone of voltage. "…It's over."

"Unless you know a way of recouping the operational capacity we've lost in the past twelve hours, then yes. Ninety-eight percent of anything is a damn big number."

"Hm."

A slow shrug rolled through Ritsuko's indigo shoulders. "And I suppose now's a good a time as any to sound complacent."

"I know what I have to do," said Misato. "I'm just, I'm relieved, in a way? All those orders…I always got the feeling that asshole was waiting for me to disobey him."

"Which asshole?"

"C'mon, Ritsuko."

"Whoever said you're no good at following orders?"

"My father."

"Punch it."

Misato jammed her thumb into the switch below the voltage panel, watched the words snap green and elevator doors part before her. She steered the lapels of her cardinal jacket tightly across her shoulders, lurched into the car, and turned around. "It's just killing me that I care at all what dad would think about all this…you know what I mean?"

"Oh, I can relate," said Ritsuko. "But it doesn't matter what your father or Gendo thinks, Misato. You're reliable in your own special way."

"Gee, thanks, I-"

A nictitating chain link door crashed closed between them. Ritsuko stood on the other side, face tattooed with fence mesh shadows, and stared. "Very reliable. Otherwise, we wouldn't have stayed friends. If my opinion counts for anything."

"Ritsuko?"

"I guess I'm saying I have a pretty good grip on what Shinji means to you, and I know you won't want to watch him die. You don't deserve that. But you'll find out just how far this place goes down, so try to think of it as a win-win situa-"

Ritsuko's hand shot into her pocket, fished up the controller. Jiggled the little plastic pad until Misato's twitching fingers retreated from the folds of her jacket. Huddled, cream light in the car nailed shadows into Katsuragi's brow. "What are you going to do?"

"Flay him." Ritsuko paused. "I'll have his back. I'll suck the meat off his spine. He'll taste like his father." Emerald eyes raked the floor, and she nodded. "I'll do that. I'll find Gendo, and compare."

"You have to hear yourself." Misato tested a thin, defective smile. "I…really, did you listen to what you said?"

"I told you no one was scanning me." Ritsuko shook her head. "Maybe you're the one who should do the listening. Maybe I'm not as good a storyteller as I made myself out to be."

Misato closed her mouth.

Then her eyes drifted away from the saliva bubbling through Ritsuko's lipstick, past the doctor's teased blond fringes, over the notched collar of Akagi's lab coat; Misato blinked and whispered. "Ritsuko…"

"You shouldn't have asked me. Hyuga and I, we're different degrees of madness, but it's really hard for me to pretend I'm not overjoyed I know where Shinji's going."

"You know where he's going?" everywhere asked.

The lizard glaze on Ritsuko's face evolved into a frown as she turned and stared back at the bulging black behind her, as she watched dark chameleon shapes – thin and bulbous, stiff and billowing, bobbing, side cocked – skirting its edges, distending it. Atomized breaths floated weightless in the black, condensed and pooled and peppered it. Phased through it:

"You know where he is?"

"Doctor Akagi."

"Where is he?"

"We can't find him."

"I need to know."

"Doctor."

"We looked-"

"Tell us."

"I need, I have to talk to him-"

"Doctor."

"Can't you just tell us-"

"I looked everywhere."

"You know."

"I just want to speak to-"

"You think you're the only-"

"Where's he going?"

"Just for a minute-"

"Just do it."

"We heard you-"

"Please-"

"Hear her out."

"_Everywhere_."

"Do it."

"One minute-"

"_Akagi_."

"You're starting to piss me off."

"I won't hurt him."

"Do it…"

Misato jerked into motion, edging to the cage wire. Sheet metal waves rolled through the screen as she hooked her fingers through its diamond lattice. "Get in, I'll kick the living shit out of you later." Misato huffed, tufting hair behind Ritsuko's ear. "Stop thinking…"

Ritsuko dipped into her pocket again, purchased another object. Her elbow flapped wide as she eased out its dimpled composite grip and thumbed its hammer. "I wish I still needed a smoke."

"What the hell are you doing?"

The murmurs stalled, reversed, rippled away from the elevator in choppy susurrations that clashed in the back of the room. There, the noises buried or eroded one another before surging forward again. A chorusing froth cresting onto the alcove of light.

"Do it."

"Swing batter!"

Ritsuko slung her arm out below the glinting arc that strobed through her head; an aluminum _ping_ with a hamburger finish. Misato sprouted wet red freckles as her friend and the controller and the revolver wheeled down.

"Ritsuko!"

The dozen hands that stabbed out from the shadows caught crumbling sections of Ritsuko Akagi, hauled her away. Misato peeled back from the cage and drew her own gun up and across the mesh, the muzzle scribbling on the curtain of sibilating night beyond the screen. "Shit, shit!"

"Sit tight, Major," everywhere said. "Shit tight." Moist laughter crunching down on bone. A face bobbed in and out of the light – brunette sideburns with matted, bottle blonde stubble – before a plastic crack fractured the air. "Oops."

Sounds of frenzied rending faded as the heavy elevator doors sighed across their runners, and closed.

Misato stood down. She felt up, then slapped then kicked the dead control panel. Then plastered herself in a far corner when the vehicle shuddered and sagged downward. "No way, no fucking way!"

Another hiccup in momentum buckled her; she scraped her jaw on the tops of her knees as the car vibrated, juggled her…and began a behaved, Teflon ascent through headquarters.

When Misato opened her eyes she wiped her face, read her palms; Ritsuko's blood streaked across them like sanguine comets. "No fucking way…"

She looked up when the intercom set in the drop ceiling wrapped her in cellophane static; she cut a wide frown when it told her she had two hours and thirty minutes to live.

* * *

_Self-destruction is now voted for by the AIs. Self-destruction will be executed one-hundred and fifty minutes after all three have agreed to it. The ranges of self- destruction are Geoid depth - 280, -140, and floor 0. Due to the activation of special rule 582, cancellation by two of the AIs is impossible._

* * *

"We needed a way to negate special rule 582," said Maya."We decided on a patch at Tech One's post-operation analysis for the Iruel incident. Doctor Akagi and I. This was real slapdash at first, understand? We didn't know if the Angels were going to keep coming at us through the Magi, but after a while, we felt comfortable enough to go back to the system developer's notes."

Shinji heard her shuffling from beyond the entrance of the men's restroom. He retracted his toes from the frigid tile floor, fumbling with the elastic drawstring of his pants as Ibuki's voice bounced around him.

"We were shooting for voice-authorization, or at least push-button functionality. Major Katsuragi thought it was a good idea, in the event that Doctor Akagi and I were killed. I'll still have to negotiate with the system OS, but that won't take much more than twenty, thirty minutes. So why are we still here?"

"We're waiting for Shinji," said Rei. "We are waiting for you."

That last part had been directed at him, and totally made it easier to forget he was now touching himself within earshot of Rei Ayanami. "I just got in here…"

"That super literal thing you do…" said Maya, and Shinji could almost see her jacking up her eyebrows, pointing at the First Child with a twirling finger, "I can't really imagine anyone else doing it with a straight face."

"I'm thinking," said Rei.

"About heading back up to Central Dogma? You can stop worrying – Doctor Akagi set up a Magi interface in the Reserve Control Center, so I can institute the patch from there. And you can stop worrying about her, too. Even if she was a threat, we have a bigger problem, now."

"Ikari?"

"Give me a minute, okay?"

And that was probably Maya blowing air. Uh huh. Tamping out embers beneath her heel. "Did you hear what I said? I don't think Doctor Akagi's in the Reser-"

"I think she's dead," said Rei. The silence behind him crystallized the sweat slinking down his spine. "It is unlikely anyone could initiate the self-destruct sequence without Ritsuko Akagi's cooperation."

"No, that's…" Maya chuckled, breathy, just lopsided, "that's not what I meant-"

"Shinji."

"Leave me alone!"

"Try and follow me, here. Hyuga and Aoba are trapped in Central Dogma and want out," said Maya. "If either have their faculties, they're all they'll need to initiate self-destruction from source…I showed them how. And Sempai…" Maya swallowed, "she's already tried deceiving Shinji. If anything, she's anticipated where we're headed and is moving to intercept."

"Or she's dead."

"Stop saying that!" Cream-colored walls replayed Maya Ibuki until Shinji picked up vinyl scratches in her voice skipping over syllables, scattering her breath. "You're not going to let me stop this? Fine, your call, Rei. Good luck finding a place to hide from a twelve megaton yield."

He shivered.

An exhaust fan chirped above the urinal to fill the space between Maya giving up on arguing with Rei, and the intercom reminding Shinji why Maya had been arguing with Rei.

_Self-destruction will be executed one-hundred and forty minutes after all three have agreed to it._

It was pretty easy to go after that.

* * *

"Hate the fucking dark…"

Misato pinched a wad of napkins from a condiments rack before crumpling behind the MOS Burger service counter. A wrist flick ejected her USP's half-spent cartridge and fat runnels of blood migrating down the blade of her hand. She pressed the napkins to the drooling red frowns perforating the heel of her palm, and let her tongue sizzle behind her teeth. "I hate it…"

Misato traced the bill of the upper concourse, its inverted shoreline leaning over the concessions at the West Campus Cafeteria, while the napkins drank at the gouges in her hand. A weather girl glowed at her from a row of ceiling-bolted flatscreen monitors – Rockettes in twill skirt suits. Katsuragi winced up at nearest screen, at the girl's timeslot smile, flickering, looping back and flickering. At the girl's pert breasts, always pointing out the coagulated mud front refusing to swing out over the Kanto Plain.

At Shinji's dour, middle school portrait, frozen in the top right corner of the screen.

Misato dabbed her hand once more before flinging the napkins away. Then she bounced the cartridge in her clean palm and clapped it back into its housing.

"Click…"

She went rigid, rolled her shoulders in a guerilla crouch and blinked into a slit in the stainless steel counter separating her and the atrium. Shadows loped through the artificial moonlight buttressing the temperglass wall wrapped across the Geofront – silhouettes that caught the legs of aluminum-teak chairs and capsized tables as they swayed toward her. Misato's empty hand squeezed into a paw.

The thud threw light everywhere at once.

* * *

"That should do it." Maya stepped back from the console, shaking her head at its blinking push-button haughtiness. Naughty-naughty.

Not that Shinji could tell it had been anymore cheeky than the other control panels cresting the edge of each Reserve Control Center plateau. The panel's utility fit the rest of the room, decorated with gray rice terraces trimmed in tightropes of red and green light; Central Dogma, dehydrated and compressed into dry, brittle function. Maya had begged to differ, had said the place looked and smelled musty.

"The climate and lighting setpoints were Unoccupied Mode," Maya explained. "I fixed it, so no more visibility problems."

"The Magi will execute the self-destruct sequence in less than ninety-five minutes." Rei may not have had it in her to be anymore threatening – just enough juice to hang between him and Ibuki, bag strap sagging off her slumping armature.

"I know that, they only play the announcement on every single level of headquarters," said Maya. "We're in the black as long as I can remove the access panel and the EM shielding."

"Do…" Shinji worked out the whine he knew would be glazed over his voice. "Do you need us to do anything?"

"Shinji." He marveled at the rust Ayanami put on his name. She mustered a sideways glance at him she couldn't keep coiled.

"Why are you hushing him up? Tech One hadn't installed removable shielding yet, so how am I supposed to get to the interface without a circular saw?" Maya ducked beneath the lip of the access panel and laid down. She started running cords to and from nearby outlets. "I'll make a list…I mean, I would if I had any paper."

"Lieutenant."

"Try the tier above us, the reserve maintenance supply room. Start with rubber gloves and a mat, please, this panel's hot."

"I will not leave you unattended."

Laughter skipped out from beneath the desktop. Maya scrunched her legs up to make triangles with her ivory stockings. "Oh, Rei, that's _perfect_. Where am I going to go, exactly? Everything I want is already here."

* * *

Shinji slipped sideways through canyons of spare parts. There happened to be lots of things in the supply room, packed and slumping on the floor or crammed onto overworked shelves above him. Somewhere around a bend of Fragile This End Ups, Rei was helping him gather the items Maya would need to keep everything from exploding.

"Lieutenant Ibuki will not be joining us at our final destination."

Allegedly helping.

Shinji came back to the pocket of bare floor space Rei had been occupying. He watched her wade through boxes brimming with spare, buck-toothed gears and Q ERTY keyboards, before she danced right by a crate full of handheld portable saws. "Right there," he said.

"What is right where?"

Nope, no appreciation for the concrete, the material, the hardware that touched you or choked your dreams. Maybe she needed to be touched.

"That's it. No, behind you, it's…" Shinji jabbed a finger at the crate, trying to pull her eyes down to it. He let her twirl in place for a second, all Baroque porcelain and steel comb concertino, before he reached behind her knees and hefted one of the tools from the bushel. "You don't know what any of this stuff does, do you?"

Shinji watched her lips melt into a frown. He couldn't keep from smiling, so he made sure it was small and comforting. There, like so. "It's okay. You know, my uncle did some carpentry on the side. The summer before I left I helped him bui-"

"Why did you not say earlier you can better identify the items Lieutenant Ibuki is requesting?"

"I just…I assumed you-"

She grabbed the saw and tracked away from him, fast and far to a hydraulic dolly circled by low-tech hutches like an Old Delhi taxi. Her voice flowed by toppled crashing plastic as she kicked a clique of dehumidifiers off the cart platform.

"Lieutenant Ibuki will also need a digital multimeter, four banana clips, red and yellow wire connecters, dielectric safety glasses, two wire strippers, a cordless soldering iron, a dozen plastic fasteners, a cordless impact wrench, a gooseneck magnifier – lighted, and a bench mounted ground point with ESD ground cords. We will use the dolly to transport the items onto the motorized disability ramp outside of the supply room."

"That'll work." Now on to sifting out all the mental refuse Rei had just dumped onto him. Shinji shook his head for that as she yanked on the steering column of the dolly. It yanked back, braying on stubborn, rusted casters. "Do you practice?"

He'd already turned to inspect the inside of a clothes locker by the time he finished asking. The vented, central air had shushed Rei up. Now, Shinji could almost see her giving up on the cart to examine the spinal nodes between his shoulder blades. Plus, there was a mirror in the locker. "My basic training included the employment of mnemonic devices and ingesting supplements that augmented activity in the hippocampus…the brain."

"I know what the hippocampus is." Shinji browsed a cluster of lockout tags, a crumpled pinup, Rei's lips pursing behind water spots on the crude, polished disc. His eyes drifted down to a propane canister in the base of the locker.

"They are all proven and accepted methods of improving memory recall."

"Then I guess that's why my father made you learn them," he said.

"Anyone can learn them."

Shinji closed the locker.

"Any human being can learn them."

"I heard you." The impact wrench jumped out at him from a DHL box gorged with green motherboards. "Kensuke literally can't read three pages of our Jōmon history text without taking a walk around his neighborhood."

"In the context of those not subject to inhibitive learning disorders."

"I know, Rei."

"You are not behaving like you know."

"I can't find any of these things we're looking for and we're all going to die. I'm preoccupied."

"The Evas are human."

Shinji took care to drop the power tool right on his foot. He ignored the blossoming pain and turned around. Rei's face glowed halogen white beneath an overhead lamp, purple seas near her mouth and cheek and nose different shades of tranquil. "What does that have to do with anything?" Breathe in, out. Out… "No they're not."

"Yes, they are," she said.

"No they're _not_."

"Yes, they are."

"No they're not!"

"Yes, they are."

He stumbled backwards over a pack of toner cartridges, maybe because he had one eye on the supply cabinet standing away from a back wall, maybe because he had his other eye on Rei as he pointed back at her. "You know what? You know what?"

"What?"

Grip something. Yes. Throttle something; the cabinet latch, thank you, chewing into his palm as he wrenched it clockwise and pulled, and Ritsuko stared out from it with her remaining eye like a zombie roped into some frat pledge. Someone must have packed her inside before hazing off all that skin from her neck and face. Because that made the most sense.

A shout, or tires screeching across tarmac. He turned in time to catch Maya – her ivory stockings, really – skidding over a scoured plank until she had enough traction to scramble back out the supply room.

Hadn't a clue why Rei was charging towards him – she was too far away to keep him from being slammed into, or keep the shrapnel inside him from fragmenting against his ribs, or the teeth from sinking into his shoulder and settling him on the ground with all the feet and grease and dust.

End of Chapter 3

A/N: I think I want to write something else for a while. I think this is serviceable, but it was a slog to write. I apologize for the delay.

Random A/N: IT'S COLLEGE BASKETBALL SEASON!1!

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.


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